Dear Lifehacker,
I often find myself in places where there's a wired ethernet connection, but no Wi-Fi, like my dorm room or a hotel room when I travel. I don't want to be tethered to one spot! How can I add Wi-Fi to one of these places on the cheap?

Signed,
Wire Free

Dear Wire Free,
While most places do have Wi-Fi these days, it sucks when you get to your hotel for vacation to find out that the room has wired ethernet and no wireless, or if you've just settled into your dorm to find out the rooms are wired-only. It's not difficult to fix, but you do need to exercise caution about how you do it, and some methods are more tech-savvy than others. Let's look at a couple of options.

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Buy a Wireless Router and Set It In Bridge Mode

Buying a cheap wireless router, like an Apple Airport Express or an old Linksys WRT54G and setting it up as a wireless bridge is probably the fastest and easiest way to give any space with a wired connection an instant wireless network. Bridge mode means that instead of managing the traffic on your LAN, like most routers do, it's just sharing your existing LAN—that is, the hotel or dorm room's network—among a few specific devices over the air. Photo by Ryoichi Tanaka.

When I travel, I still pack one of the old-style Airport Express models in my laptop bag. I can plug it into the wall, plug in an ethernet cable in my hotel room, and use my laptop anywhere in the room, or connect my Wi-Fi iPad to the network if I choose. The same applies for dorm rooms and other locations with only wired connections. If you want to go the extra mile, install the Tomato or DD-WRT replacement firmware on your router to add tons of useful features, like bandwidth throttling, added security tools, reporting and monitoring, and access controls. You can even give your laptops priority over your XBox, for example, so your roommate's gaming habits don't get in the way of your studying and research.

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Warning: In most dorms, adding a wireless router is against your campus IT department's usage rules, and may get you in trouble if you're busted. I worked in campus IT for my alma mater several years ago, and every single year we inevitably had some freshman somewhere on campus who hooked up a router to their room's ethernet jack, misconfigured it, and their router started acting like the gateway for every computer on their local LAN—which meant no one in the building or on the floor could connect to the internet. They all called us to complain, and we had to track the unlucky kid down and pull out his router. Photo by webhamster.

If you're going to do this, Plug in your router and set up its network config in bridge mode before you plug in that ethernet jack-this ensures you won't have any networking snafus when you first plug it in. If you get your connection privileges revoked by the powers that be, don't blame us!

Turn Your PC Into a Wireless HotSpot

If you don't have the budget for a wireless router, or left yours at home, you're not out of options. You can always use Internet Connection Sharing on your Mac or Windows system to share your connection with other devices nearby. We've shown you how to do this in Windows and in OS X before, but the premise is simple: as long as your laptop is connected to wired ethernet, you can turn your PC into a hotspot for your tablet, phone, or other devices to connect to. It takes a little setup, but once you're finished, you won't even need the router. You just have to make sure the PC that's sharing its connection is on and online at all times, though.

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Tether Your Phone

If you have a smartphone with a data plan, tethering has never been a better option. Verizon and AT&T now include tethering in the costs of their base plans, and as long as you don't go over your bandwidth limits for the month, you're in the clear. If your wi-fi needs are occasional, like the occasional game or web surfing on your tablet, or you want to use your laptop from bed and your cable doesn't reach, it's a good option. If you're trying to connect a dozen devices like game consoles, smart TVs, multiple tablets and laptops, and more to the internet, it's not going to work too well. Photo by Danny Choo.

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Buy an 3G/4G Access Point

If you have money to spend and you don't want to run afoul of your campus (or hotel!) IT department, buying a 3G/4G USB modem or shared access point like a MiFi is definitely the way to go. Those devices usually come with generous monthly data plans (in some cases, up to 10GB/mo,) and allow you to connect multiple devices at the same time.

If you're headed to a conference, meetup, or some other big event and want to make sure you'll have an internet connection when you get there, this is the best way to go. Still, MiFis and other cellular APs are geared more for business travelers than dorm rooms, so the bandwidth limits won't stand up to a month of Netflix streaming, mind you. If you're trying to hook up your Xbox for online gaming and Netflix streaming in your dorm room, it might not be the best option—not because of performance, but because you'll probably run out of data after a few short days. Photo by Samat Jain.

No Matter What, Keep Your Connection Secure

Whichever option you choose, make sure you set up your wireless network as securely as possible. Remember that WEP is extremely easy to crack and WPAis stronger, but not impossible to crack, so a combination of WPA2, a good strong password for your network, and access controls for specific devices (MAC Address filtering alone is so insecure it's not worth mentioning, but when used together with strong passwords and WPA2, it offers another layer of protection and teaches you to get familiar with the MAC addresses for your gadgets—that way you know if the MAC for your Xbox is online and you can see it's turned off, someone's spoofing it) is the way to keep your fledgling network secure.

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A little security through obscurity is a good idea too. If you're using your network in a hotel that's packed with convention attendees or a dorm full of students with the same problem you have. Hide your SSID and keep your network to yourself. The last thing you want to do is wind up inadvertently running an open network, and get into trouble yourself when someone else does something illegal on it.

We hope at least one of these options works for your use case, Wire Free! Remember, be careful with whatever network you set up. With care and caution, you can add the Wi-Fi you need to almost any space. If you go cellular, you don't even need a wired connection to ride on. Good luck!